Lincoln started to cry. I ran upstairs to his room. I tried to wake him but he was deep into a dream. He was saying, Stop, turn off, stop. I lifted him out of his bed and turned on the light. He kept screaming. I sat down at the electric keyboard in his room with him on my lap. I played two bars of Thelonious Monk’s Everything Happens to Me. At last Lincoln woke up. He told me his bad dream. He had been in our exercise room and the treadmill turned itself on. The belt was whirring and the platform raised itself to the steepest incline. Lincoln pulled the plug out of the wall, but it kept on running. He said, I tried to make it stop, Dada, but it wouldn’t. I told him it was okay, that it was over now. I put him back in his bed and stayed with him, stroking his damp hair, until he fell back asleep.
Katya had been standing in the hall outside his door, ready to come in and help if I needed her. When Lincoln was three and four, he had these nightmares once or twice a week. Katya used to be the only one of us who could calm him down. I would try and fail, and she would have to intervene. This night was the first time in several months that he’d had one, and I felt absurdly happy that Katya had let me handle it by myself. I made it through the day without being a total failure. I walked out of his room, feeling serene. Katya was waiting there, right outside the door. She kissed me softly and said, You’re a great dad.
She always knows exactly which lie to tell.
WHEN I GOT TO THE OFFICE the next morning Kassie and Gary were already there, doing computer searches for the guy Green said had murdered Henry Quaker’s family. Green had been in the jail during the Quaker trial. During two days of the trial, there was also an inmate named Ruben Francisco Cantu, the only Ruben in the jail at the same time Green was there. He’d been stopped in a routine traffic stop and when cops opened the trunk they found bricks of marijuana. He bonded out two days later. I said, So I guess the rabbit chase goes on for a little while longer, huh? I asked where Cantu was now. Kassie told me that he’d served three years of a ten-year sentence and had gotten paroled five years ago. The address we had for him was two years old, but it was all we had. I said, I think I’ll take a drive over to the east side.
When the dry wind blows in from the west, carrying the petrochemical fumes toward Lafayette, the only toxic clue is that the setting sun looks like a blood orange sinking into the Sabine. People who live with poisoned air get to see the most beautiful sunsets, the bargain for not getting to see as many of them. Cantu lived five doors down from an eggshell-colored clapboard church sitting on top of cinder blocks with a listing portable sign that said, Jesus Cristo es el Hombre. I parked at the church and walked across the oyster-shell parking lot to see if anyone was inside. A man sat at a piano, picking out a tune with his left hand and jotting down the notes with his right. I said, Perdon, senor. Yo quiero saber si usted conoce a uno de sus vecinos, un hombre se llama Ruben Cantu? He asked me in English whether I was a police officer. I told him I wasn’t. He said he had a lot of neighbors named Cantu. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Ruben. I asked him whether I could leave my car in his parking lot, and when he said I could, I said, Muchisimas gracias, and walked down the street.
The house I hoped was Cantu’s looked like a sharecropper’s cabin. It had peeling white paint and a shattered window. From inside I could hear Spanish television and canned laughter. I knocked and a man wearing jockey shorts and a hooded sweatshirt opened the door. I introduced myself and said, Yo quiero hacerle unas preguntas. Usted preferie que hablar en Ingles or Espanol? My plan was to go ahead and assume he was Cantu until he corrected me.
He said, You talk Spanish like the Unabomber writes. I speak English. What do you want?
He didn’t invite me in. I asked him whether he knew someone named Henry Quaker. He said no. I told him that someone I knew on death row told me he had some information that might help my client. I asked whether he knew why someone might say that. He said no. I asked him whether he knew Ezekiel Green. He said no, but he delayed a brief second, and his eyes changed. He knew him. I asked whether he knew who had killed Quaker’s family. He said, I already told the other guy I don’t know nothing about it. That was a slip. Green’s name had rattled him. As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. I bluffed and asked him what was the detective’s name. He cocked his head to the side and didn’t answer, but I knew. Some cop had talked to him. I asked him how long they had talked. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me like he was trying to figure out whether I was actually stupid or just pretending. He said, How long? Are you loco? I don’t remember, man, it was a long time ago. He relaxed again, no longer nervous. I asked like how long. Days? Weeks? Months? He said, Nah, I’m talking about years ago, right after your client killed his family.
I said, A detective asked you these questions years ago?
He said, What’s the matter? You don’t hear so good? While I was thinking of what else to ask, he said, Adios, abogado, and he closed the door. I stood there awhile and thought about knocking, but he probably wouldn’t have answered, and besides, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. So I bought a lemon aqua fresca at a taco cart that had set up in the church parking lot and headed back to town.
On the drive back I called the office and told Jerome to file a new appeal. I thought we had learned enough to entitle us to a hearing in state court. We had Green saying he knew Cantu committed the crime, and we had Cantu saying that he had been interrogated, and we had Lomax recanting and saying he incriminated Henry because a police officer pressured him to. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and even though it didn’t answer very many questions, it raised quite a few, which was all I could realistically hope to do at that point. It seemed likely that the cops talked to Cantu around the time of the crime, and that detail should have been in the police reports, and therefore known to Quaker’s trial lawyers, but it must not have been, or Quaker’s lawyer, bad as he was, would have at least talked to him. We had police testing Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue, but also no mention of a gun in police reports. Lots of dogs weren’t barking. There were several threads in the case that Quaker’s trial lawyer had ignored, and we needed to pull on them to see what unraveled. But the first thing I needed to do was have another conversation with Henry.
I WAS MEETING KATYA for dinner at La Griglia, and I got there a few minutes early. I ordered a martini at the bar. Jocelyn Truesdale was sitting at the end of the counter. She motioned me over. She said, You drinking alone, counselor?
I said, Hi, Judge. I’m waiting for my wife.
She said, Have I met her? The answer was no, but I did not want to be talking to Judge Truesdale about my wife. She caught the bartender’s eye and pointed at her empty glass. She said, Want to buy me a drink?
I didn’t. I said, Sure.
She said, I hear rumors you are going to ask me to reopen the Quaker case. Is that true? When she said
I tried to think of some way that this conversation was not highly inappropriate. I lied and said, We haven’t decided what we are going to do. We might ask for a new hearing.
She said, I remember that case. It’s always bothered me a little. She was drinking scotch on ice. She took a swallow and chewed a piece of ice.
Katya arrived. She saw me and took a step toward the bar. I stood up before she could walk over. I said, I’ll let you know, though. I’ve got to go. It’s been nice talking to you, Judge. I practically jogged toward Katya and steered her to our table. She asked me whom I had been talking to. I said, The judge in the Quaker case. I might need an expert opinion here, but I think she might have been coming on to me.
After we ordered, I told Katya about my conversation. She said, It’s possible she was hitting on you, but she might have just been drunk. Your track record of accurately perceiving women, frankly, isn’t all that great.
I told Katya the story: Truesdale had been married to a cop. She sold real estate by day and went to law school at night. Early one morning her husband pulled over a driver for drunk driving. He asked the driver to get out of the car. He didn’t know it, but the driver had just robbed a gas station. The driver came out firing. Truesdale’s husband was hit twice in the chest and once in the head. He died at the scene. The driver jumped back into the car and sped off. Police tracked him down the next day, but there was no video of the stop, and they couldn’t find the gun. So they did what cops sometimes do when another cop gets killed. They beat the guy until he told them where he had thrown it. They found the gun in the bayou, just where he said it would be.
The case got assigned to Judge Dan Steele. Steele was a former marine. He served two tours in Vietnam before he went to law school. His law-and-order credentials were like early Clint Eastwood. But he had integrity. He ruled that the only reason the police found the gun was because they had beaten the suspect. So he concluded that the prosecutor couldn’t use the gun as evidence. Without the gun, there was no case. The shooter walked. Everybody was livid, especially the victims’-rights crowd. They made it their mission to defeat Steele in the next election, and they convinced Truesdale to run against him. She crushed him. Six months after she took the bar
